Introduction

npm-dep provides a way to cache your tools dependencies on your file system so you don't need to re-download them again while allowing to share them between projects.

Currently NPM install all the dependencies from dependencies and devDependencies inside your package.json file at install time (npm install).

But what if:

• You just want to install a custom set of dependencies when you execute a run script (npm run xxx).

• You don't want to re-download Webpack, PhantomJS, Karma for a freshly created project.

• You want to easily check if any new version of a dependency is available.

Then maybe npm-dep is for you...

Usage

To enable npm-dep inside your package, you simply need to add it to your dependencies and add a new section dep inside your package.json file like the following example.

package.json

{
    "dependencies": {
        "npm-dep": "latest"
    },
    "dep": {
        "default": {
            "underscore": "1.8.3"
        },
        "test": {
            "expect":"1.13.4",
            "jasmine-core": "2.4.1",
            "jest-cli": "0.8.2",
            "phantomjs": "1.9.19"
        },
        "build": {
            "node-libs-browser": "1.0.0",

            "babel-core": "6.4.5",
            "babel-loader": "6.2.1",
            "babel-preset-es2015": "6.3.13",
            "babel-preset-react": "6.3.13",

            "css-loader": "0.23.1",
            "expose-loader": "0.7.1",
            "file-loader": "0.8.5",
            "json-loader": "0.5.4",
            "style-loader": "0.13.0",
            "url-loader": "0.5.7",

            "webpack": "1.12.12"
        }
    },
    "script": {
        "postinstall": "npm-dep --silent default",
        "pretest": "npm-dep --silent build test",
        "prebuild": "npm-dep --silent build"
    }
}

or externalise that information to another file so it could be used by another project that depend on your npm-dep friendly application.

# ./config/tools.js
module.exports = {
    
    // Use to build code
    groupNameA: {
        packageName: 'version',
        [...]
    },

    // Use to test section A
    groupNameB: {
        packageName2: 'version54',
        [...]
    }
}

# package.json
{
    [...]

    "config": {
        "npm-dep": {
            "path": "config/tools.js"
        }
    }
}

Then when running, npm-dep will cache all downloaded packages inside your ${HOME}/.npm-dep/pkg@ver/... directory and will then copy any node_modules/.bin/* and node_modules/* into your local ./node_modules/ directory.

Here is the full list of usage:

  Usage: npm-dep [options] and/or target1 target2 ...

  Options:

    -h, --help           output usage information
    -V, --version        output the version number

    -c, --check          Check outdated dependencies.
    -p, --check-package  Check package.json dependencies.
    
    -l, --list           List dependency targets.
    -a, --all            Install all target dependencies.
    
    -s, --silent         Silence any output.

Licensing

npm-dep is licensed under BSD Clause 3.

Getting Involved

Fork our repository and do great things. At Kitware, we've been contributing to open-source software for 15 years and counting, and want to make npm-dep useful to as many people as possible.